Ivy Getty, Paris Hilton and the Return of the Madcap Heiress
When model and artist Ivy Getty got married in November, it did not go unnoticed. The ceremony was widely covered, and a not-so-friendly internet parsed the optics of having as her officiant Nancy Pelosi, the good fortune of her sweater-wearing rescue dog, and her bridal gown, which, designed from a shattered mirror by John Galliano for Maison Margiela, looked as if it could bring at least seven years of bad luck.
Also noted: her surname. As the scion of one of the most important oil families from America’s robber baron past, Getty is a throwback to an era of loopy, over-the-top, fashion--embracing heiresses. The public’s obsession with the Nancy Cunards and Gloria Vanderbilts of the world always held a splintered, glitzy mirror up to our collective relationship to wealth, work, and woman-hood. But these kinds of swan faded from the zeitgeist in recent years, and the words to describe them became something of an insult, if they weren’t always.
These days it’s far more common for women who inherit or stand to inherit astronomical sums of money to eschew the media. “Really rich people don’t want press anymore,” journalist Bob Colacello says. And if they do, it’s because they want to be known for their own wealth building endeavors. Enter Getty, stage left, and re-enter Paris Hilton, stage right, and we’re right back where we started, a century, give or take, after we first started paying attention.
“The 1920s was when the tabloids really became big. And we had so many newspapers that -journalists needed to fill. New York had, like, eight,” says Colacello, who has known his share of PYTs, from Doris Duke to Brigid Berlin.
When the Great Depression hit, the fascination exploded. Instead of inspiring animus, depictions of young women with the freedom of money offered an escape. Films like It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey glamorized the youthful, affluent, and female, and newspapers seized on the likes of Barbara Hutton, the five-and-dime empire heiress dubbed Poor Little Rich Girl after her fourth marriage ended.
At the time, these real life women seemed as zany as their cinematic analogs, but the reality was much darker. Hutton dealt with abusive relationships, drug abuse, and anorexia and was “vulnerable to adventurers and those who would use her for money,” says author Amy Fine Collins. Duke was prone to rages and in 1966 accidentally ran over and killed her interior decorator, Eduardo Tirella, a blockbuster story that returned to the news last year when the Newport police department reopened the case. (It was again declared an accident.)
Then, a pivot. “In the ’60s, heiresses rebelled,” Colacello says, “and found their way to Andy Warhol’s Factory.” There Colacello hung out with women like Berlin, Viva, “Baby” Jane Holzer, and Edie Sedgwick, who bucked their posh upbringings to act in risqué films, scandalize their parents, and party extremely hard. Sedgwick OD’d in 1971.
As Colacello tells it, heiresses—who did not come from the streets—were declared card--carrying members of the “youthquake,” like Marisa Berenson (father, a diplomat; mother, a socialite named GoGo). There was some boundary-pushing in these moments—the choice of an artistic life over a traditional one; the premium on a younger generation’s perspective—that has been, over the years, habituated and commercialized into something regular, even bourgeois. Berenson is now a grande dame, on Instagram no less. Berlin’s last act of apostasy before her death in 2020 was to become a prim-and-proper Republican, just like her mother “Honey.” Viva’s daughter, Gaby Hoffmann, is today an acclaimed actress, and Holzer sold her Palm Beach home a year ago for $7.5 million, proceeds that will no doubt enhance her art collection.
Gloria von Thurn und Taxis (“Princess TNT”) may have embodied the excess of the ’80s, but she too has mellowed—into a staunch Catholic who pals around with Stephen K. Bannon.
For the last 20-odd years, however, the American heiress discourse has been dominated by one person. Hilton first burst onto the scene through raucous nights out, but she captured the national interest when her ex--boyfriend published what today we’d call revenge porn. (Another thing we didn’t know then: She had recently been released from an allegedly abusive boarding school.)
Through that time, Hilton either anticipated or rode the wave of the personal branding game, presenting and commodifying an aspirationally lavish lifestyle that traces her current wealth—a reported $300 million—to her own ventures as a brand, DJ, and TV star.
The early aughts’ appetite for consequence-free tabloid titillation and its fizzy coverage of excess amid the upper echelons is back again after two years of hard news and pandemic headlines. I keep a Google alert for the word “heiress,” and it eventually led me to start a newsletter on the subject called Heir Mail. I do it because the stories tickle two remote corners of my brain, the angry half that wants to keep tabs on the rich, all the better to eat them, and the fun half that likes to gossip and look at pretty dresses.
The reward is twofold. I get a shot of schadenfreude from hearing about, say, the out-of-touch weddings, plural, of private jet scion Nina Flohr to Prince Philippos of Greece, or the Eurotrash-themed birthday bash of Francesca Packer Barham, granddaughter of late Australian billionaire Kerry Packer. And I get a guilty charge from following their love lives and outfits way too closely.
“Everyone’s always emulating old money, because everyone wants to do what old money does,” says Gawker writer Sarah Hagi. For her, the most striking aspect of the media blitz surrounding Getty’s wedding was the normalizing coverage of out-of-the-ordinary goings-on, like, you know, reciting your marriage vows before the Speaker of the House. When we get a rare peek at the private lives of the elite, we can’t look away. Getty may have bragged to one outlet that she didn’t need to turn to Pinterest for inspiration, but she’s sure to see her own gown Pinned and re-Pinned for years to come.
Meanwhile, when Hilton wed venture capitalist Carter Reum, the multiday bacchanal last fall was filmed as a reality show, Paris in Love, and she was rewarded with boffo social media impressions and enough column inches to rival all of Hutton’s seven weddings.
Hilton, better than any other pop culture figure now, understands this country’s unique push-and-pull relationship to money: riveted and envious, repulsed and intrigued, a powerful double helix that has us rolling our eyes and gripping our phones. Yet she also knows that a story of hard work is invaluable to the narrative, even if that story obscures innate advantages. After all, what’s more American than an heiress pulling herself up by her designer bootstraps?
This story appears in the February 2022 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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